Analytics 3.0 – The Emerging Data Economy

In recent times, the big Internet companies – the Googles, Yahoos and eBays – have proven that it is possible to build a sustainable business on data analytics, in which corporate decisions and actions are being seamlessly guided via an analytics culture, based on data, measurement and quantifiable results. Now, two of the top data analytics thinkers say we are reaching a point that non-tech, non-Internet companies are on their way to becoming analytics-driven organizations in a similar vein, as part of an emerging data economy.

In a report written for the International Institute for Analytics, Thomas Davenport and Jill Dyché divulge the results of their interviews with 20 large organizations, in which they find big data analytics to be well integrated into the decision-making cycle. “Large organizations across industries are joining the data economy,” they observe. “They are not keeping traditional analytics and big data separate, but are combining them to form a new synthesis.”

Davenport and Dyché call this new state of management “Analytics 3.0, ” in which the concept and practices of competing on analytics are no longer confined to data management and IT departments or quants – analytics is embedded into all key organizational processes. That means major, transformative effects for organizations. “There is little doubt that analytics can transform organizations, and the firms that lead the 3.0 charge will seize the most value,” they write.

Analytics 3.0 is the current of three distinct phases in the way data analytics has been applied to business decision making, Davenport and Dyché say. The first two “eras” looked like this:

Analytics 1.0, prevalent between 1954 and 2009, was based on relatively small and structured data sources from internal corporate sources.

Analytics 2.0, which arose between 2005 and 2012, saw the rise of the big Web companies – the Googles and Yahoos and eBays – which were leveraging big data stores and employing prescriptive analytics to target customers and shape offerings. This time span was also shaped by a growing interest in competing on analytics, in which data was applied to strategic business decision-making. “However, large companies often confined their analytical efforts to basic information domains like customer or product, that were highly-structured and rarely integrated with other data,” the authors write.

In the Analytics 3.0 era, analytical efforts are being integrated with other data types, across enterprises.

This emerging environment “combines the best of 1.0 and 2.0—a blend of big data and traditional analytics that yields insights and offerings with speed and impact,” Davenport and Dyché say. The key trait of Analytics 3.0 “is that not only online firms, but virtually any type of firm in any industry, can participate in the data-driven economy. Banks, industrial manufacturers, health care providers, retailers—any company in any industry that is willing to exploit the possibilities—can all develop data-based offerings for customers, as well as supporting internal decisions with big data.”

Davenport and Dyché describe how one major trucking and transportation company has been able to implement low-cost sensors for its trucks, trailers and intermodal containers, which “monitor location, driving behaviors, fuel levels and whether a trailer/container is loaded or empty. The quality of the optimized decisions [the company] makes with the sensor data – dispatching of trucks and containers, for example – is improving substantially, and the company’s use of prescriptive analytics is changing job roles and relationships.”

New technologies and methods are helping enterprises enter the Analytics 3.0 realm, including “a variety of hardware/software architectures, including clustered parallel servers using Hadoop/MapReduce, in-memory analytics, and in-database processing,” the authors adds. “All of these technologies are considerably faster than previous generations of technology for data management and analysis. Analyses that might have taken hours or days in the past can be done in seconds.”

In addition, another key characteristic of big data analytics-driven enterprises is the ability to fail fast – to deliver, with great frequency, partial outputs to project stakeholders. With the rise of new ‘agile’ analytical methods and machine learning techniques, organizations are capable of delivering “insights at a much faster rate,” and provide for “an ongoing sense of urgency.”

Perhaps most importantly, big data and analytics are integrated and embedded into corporate processes across the board. “Models in Analytics 3.0 are often being embedded into operational and decision processes, dramatically increasing their speed and impact,” Davenport and Dyché state. “Some are embedded into fully automated systems based on scoring algorithms or analytics-based rules. Some are built into consumer-oriented products and features. In any case, embedding the analytics into systems and processes not only means greater speed, but also makes it more difficult for decision-makers to avoid using analytics—usually a good thing.”